1. Field
Aspects of embodiments of the present invention relate to an integrated input control and output rendering system.
2. Related Art
The proliferation of processor-driven electronic devices, including, for example, flat screen display devices, touch screens, and “smart” devices (such as smartphones, tablet computers, etc.), has caused a great increase in the replacement of traditional electronic devices (e.g., televisions, cameras) with more versatile flat screen display devices, touch screens, and applications (or “apps”) that run on the smartphones and other smart devices.
Such devices, however, may have their own processors and operating systems—together with their associated processes, priorities, interrupts, and polling—that are replacing more traditional dedicated (and specialized) circuitry for input control and output rendering. Accordingly, adequate response time for acknowledging input actions or commands (such as touching a portion of the display, or moving a device such as a camera lens), or for overlaying other information can be challenging for some types of input since the time and overhead needed to go through the stack of operating system routines to process the input action or data and then acknowledge, respond, or display it to the user through an output display or other rendering device (e.g., speakers) can exceed real time response criteria. Further, alternatives to dealing with real time response criteria, such as more abbreviated processing, may provide insufficient functionality to satisfy users.
Such a delay or abbreviated processing may cause the display device, touch screen, or smart device to lag (or appear to lag) behind the user's input or deliver undesired content, which can lead to a poorer user experience. Even if the display device or smart device may be keeping up with the input, the appearance of lag (such as not timely acknowledging a user input command with the appropriate output action, or not displaying overlay data properly) creates the appearance to the user that the display device or smart device is not keeping up. This can lead to situations such as positive feedback (e.g., where the user tries to re-enter the input command, often multiple times) or unnecessary pausing by the user waiting for the appropriate acknowledgements or poorer displayed images and corresponding overlay information.